Nothing is Impossible

I was watching martial arts from Eurosport, when I saw Shaolin monks performing kung fu. After kicking and jumping and waving their arms, I saw something I almost couldn’t believe was happening.

One of the monks took a meditation session that didn’t last for long. He was obviously focusing on the following act. After staying silent and calm for about 30 secs or so, he started. He went on, and soon the monk was standing on his 2 fingers, like in the picture below.

Do not try this at home!
This picture is from an another similar event that was reported by BBC

I was amazed… the camera zoomed close showing how the 2 fingers were bending strongly, and this maybe 70 kilograms (or 130lbs) heavy guy was standing there on his fingers. The monk have trained their kung fu for years, so I really want to make sure you get the point that do not try this at home. I tried doing pushups with 10 fingers (like they do in volley ball trainings) and it gave me an impression how darn hard standing on just 2 fingers would be. If using 10 fingers to do pushups feels that tough, you can realize how hard would it be to stand on fingers. That’s many, many, many times tougher.

When somebody claims that something is impossible, I can ask them would they believe standing on one or two fingers would be impossible… and tell them this story.

And for the record, there are pictures on the web where these monks are standing on just one finger.

@Gibbage: Well, any outcome is possible – given enough time. Like for example… if you want to fly, you can do that (by traveling with an airplane) – but if you try to fly without any aids like wave your arms very fast… that won’t make you fly (not very far anyway).